Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A variety of applications ranging from visual inspection to autonomous navigation recognize objects in an image and compute their poses in a three dimensional scene. Many such applications employ a pre-stored model of an object for accurate detection. When objects are to be detected without prior information, the task becomes more complex. Objects with textured surfaces render the task of object recognition even more complicated.
Augmented reality (AR) refers to a view of a physical (real) world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual, typically computer-generated, imagery, thereby creating a mixed reality. The augmentation may be conventionally in real time and in context with environmental elements, such a sporting event, a training exercise, a game, etc. AR technology enables the information about surrounding real world of a person to become interactive and digitally usable by adding object recognition and image generation. Artificial information about the environment and the objects may be stored and retrieved as an information layer separate from a real world view layer.
Texture extraction may be employed for AR to allow more realistic integration or recognition of real world objects. For texture extraction, projected patterns are sometimes used in order to determine the three dimensional shape of objects. These patterns are often called “structured light” and can help extract the three dimensional shape of features on objects such as faces, castings, etc. Conventional systems typically turn off or otherwise subtract out any projected image(s), sometimes removing (or cancelling) a complete three dimensional grid before texture processing. The texture is then calculated by space/frequency analysis on the pixels in the image of the subject as it would be without the projected patterns.
The present disclosure appreciates that there are numerous limitations with texture extraction in AR systems. For example, textures below a resolution capability of a detection device (e.g., a camera) may not be extracted using conventional techniques.